INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Zebedee Jones: New Paintings
New Art Centre, Sculpture Park and Gallery, Salisbury
29 November – 25 January
Reviewed by: Rosemary Shirley
Zebedee Jones rarely titles his work, and none of the new paintings, made with the classical landscapes and open spaces of the New Art Centre in mind, bears a title. They are identifiable only by their dimensions. This absence of descriptor negates the compulsion to attribute narrative or subject. To link the gorges, scratches and ridges on the surface of the paintings with the themes of land or seascape would be specious, although to avoid these comparisons is initially impossible, surrounded as the paintings are by surfaces of worn stone, aged walls and patina. However, Jones resists this reductive response to his work, the surfaces he makes are not illusory. They stand only for what they are – paint and surface in combination with the momentary experience of perception on the part of the viewer.
To attempt to describe these paintings is also a reductive exercise: their dimensions reminiscent of windows and doors, their physicality slab-like and deep stretchered, their colour borderline tones of grey, blue and green, occasionally betraying the colours of successive underpainting. Even to describe their surface – thick paint pushed to the canvas edge, building up and overhanging in glutinous stalactites, fissured and ridged, sometimes horizontal, other times vertical – seems necessary, yet is somehow redundant in saying anything meaningful about the paintings themselves, and most importantly about the experience of viewing them. Which is of course the key to these works. They are meaningless in reproduction; to see them is to realise they are unfixed, endlessly in process. Imperceptible changes in light force a constant redefinition of form, tone and colour. These new paintings represent a development of Jones' practice in that he explores different dimensions, tones in a lighter key and combination of colours within one painting. However, this new body of work continues to affirm that the removal elements of content and illusion, reducing the work to surface and substance produces complex, rather than minimal, effects.
Rosemary Shirley is Co-ordinator of the Artists' Resource Centre, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth.
Writer detail:
Rosemary Shirley is an artist based in Winchester.
Venue detail:
New Art Centre Sculpture Park and Gallery
Roche Court, East Winterslow, SALISBURY SP5 1BG
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